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With Father’s Day around the corner, many people are probably looking for the perfect gift to bring a smile to their old man. If your father is a baseball fan in general, or a Yankees fan in particular, Bill Madden may have provided it for you. Madden is the longtime baseball columnist for the New York Daily News, and in 2010 he received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, inducting him into the writer’s wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He recently released his latest book, called “A Baseball Memoir: Yankees, Typewriters, Scandals and Cooperstown”. He joined 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to talk about the book and his memories as a baseball writer.
Madden recounted for host Larry Mendte his first day covering the Yankees in the early ‘70’s, when he worked for United Press International: “Ralph Houk was the manager of the Yankees, and he was hosting a scrum in the dugout. He kind of looked around at me and the other writer, and then he looked at me again, and during the course of his conversation with us, he spit tobacco juice all over my shoes. Phil Pepe, who was the Yankee beat writer for the Daily News at the time, called me aside afterwords and said, ‘Don’t be offended by that; that’s just Ralph’s way of saying welcome to the club’.”
Madden also recounted one of the many stories he covered involving another Yankees manager, Billy Martin. In 1985, Martin got into a brawl with pitcher Ed Whitson, which happened in the hotel bar in front of Madden: “I went up to my room to dictate my story… and all of a sudden I hear this commotion in the hallway, and it’s Billy pounding on Whitson’s door, in the hallway. And I said to the office, ‘Hold on, I’ve got round three going on right outside my door’!”
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